If these pages tell the truth, then agriculture is a mode of life fertile in religious and ethical values. But it must be husbandry, not exploitation. Religious farming is a lifelong agriculture, indeed it involves generations, and its serious, devoted spirit waits for the reward, which was planted by the diligent father or grandfather, to be reaped by the son or grandson. Men will not so consecrate themselves to their children's good without the steadying influence of religion. So that agriculture and religion are each the cause, and each the effect, of the other. If this is true, then the country church should promote the husbandry of the soil. The agricultural college should be brought into the country parish, for the church's sake. Indeed the minister would do well if his scholarship be the learning of the husbandman. No other science has such religious values. No other books have such immediate relation to the well-being of the people. The minister is not ashamed to teach Greek, or Latin,--dead languages. Why should he think it beneath him "to teach the farmer how to farm," provided he can teach the farmer anything? If he be a true scholar, the farmer, who is a practical man, needs his learned co-operation in the most religious of occupations, that the land may be holy. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 12: Rural Economics, by Prof. Thos. Nixon Carver.] [Footnote 13: "The Country-Life Movement," by L. H. Bailey.] [Footnote 14: "Ireland in the New Century," by Sir Horace Plunkett.] [Footnote 15: Professor Thomas Nixon Carver.] [Footnote 16: See Chapter V.] V EXCEPTIONAL COMMUNITIES Most of this volume is devoted to the average conditions which prevail throughout the United States. The attempt is made to deal with those causes which are generally operative. It is the writer's opinion that the causes dealt with in other chapters are the prevailing causes of religious and social experience in the most of the United States. As soon as the community, after its early settlement, becomes mature, these causes show the effects here described. But there are exceptions which should be noted and the cause of their different life made clear. These exceptions are represented in the Mormons, the Scottish Presbyterians and the Pennsylvania Germans. "The best farmers in the country are the Mormons, the Scotch Presbyterians and Pennsylvania Germans." This sentence expresses a general observation of Prof. Carver of Harvard, speaking as an economist. The churches among these three classes of exceptionally prosperous farmers show great tenacity and are free from the weakness which otherwise prevails in the country church. There is a group of causes underlying this exceptional character of the three classes of farmers.